Critical op-eds by Daniel Drezner and a number of others underline how Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby is unpopular with some United States allies and congressional Republicans. Allies are frustrated by Colby’s brusque emphasis on the need for their significantly increased defense spending. Republican detractors such as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) say Colby jeopardizes U.S. global leadership by neglecting threats in Europe and the Middle East. The anti-Colby agenda was most recently evidenced amid the controversy of suspended U.S. air defense munition supplies to Ukraine. This suspension, now ended, was blamed on Colby even though he only wrote a memo on shortages of U.S. air defense munitions more generally.
Fiery criticism of the Pentagon’s No. 3 ranking official is hardly new. Colby’s nomination as undersecretary was imperiled by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and certain pro-Israel groups over Colby’s prior skepticism of U.S. military deployments relating to Iran. Today, the main line of attack leveled against Colby is that he strengthens Russia by fixating on China’s threat in the Pacific.
These attacks are largely unfair. While Colby isn’t right about everything, the main reason he takes flak is because he rejects flawed Washington establishment thinking. Specifically, he rejects allied freeloading on defense spending, exaggerations about U.S. military resources, and minimizations of the power of China‘s People’s Liberation Army. Whatever you think of them, these views align with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
In the economic domain, Trump’s foreign policy focuses on tariffs designed to rebalance what Trump regards as unfair trade relationships. In the diplomatic domain, it focuses on flashy dealing designed to secure peace. And in the military domain, it focuses on employing short bursts of combat power to strengthen U.S. security in a manner that avoids sustained conflict. Trump also focuses on pushing allies to support their defensive alliances with the U.S. through funding and action. Trump has long perceived China as the preeminent challenge to the U.S. in all of these domains.
Colby similarly views China as the preeminent threat to America, believing allies must quickly step up to share burdens more equitably. He rightly holds that greater burden sharing will allow the U.S. to maximize its readiness to avoid a catastrophic defeat if China invades Taiwan. The U.S. military cannot do everything, everywhere.
He has some key supporters. The head of the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Sam Paparo, has repeatedly emphasized that he shares this concern. Paparo is highly respected in both the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community. Nor is the threat hidden. Xi Jinping views the conquest of Taiwan as a test of personal and Chinese Communist Party destiny. He has set the PLA a deadline of 2027 to be ready to conquer Taiwan, and the PLA’s activities show it takes that order very seriously.
So why are these views unfit for polite society?
For one, Washington and European policy societies desperately want Ukraine to defeat the Russian invasion. I share that desire. And as one of the only U.S. journalists both sanctioned and under indictment by the Russian state, I can hardly be called a Kremlin sympathizer. I’d also argue that the U.S. should supply Ukraine with the long-range munitions to better enable it to strike Russian logistics and command nodes.
At the same time, however, the mismatch between China’s wartime missile threat to U.S. forces and the U.S. air defense munitions industrial base means that the U.S. should now reserve air defense munitions for U.S. military forces. Until the defense industrial base is fixed, Ukraine, Israel, and any other ally must come second to the looming Taiwan war concern. Up to 20% of the stockpile of THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense munitions — critical for the defense of U.S. bases on Okinawa and Guam — were used to defend Israel from Iranian attacks earlier this year. These munitions are in short supply, and replenishing them takes far too long. That’s a problem because China has thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles and hundreds of satellites with which to provide redundant targeting of U.S. warships and bases.
Another reason Colby is under fire comes down to the tendency of too many politicians, diplomats, think tankers, and journalists to be wooed by whispers, normally lubricated with champagne and canapés, at Western European embassies in Washington. The Europeans know how to advance narratives in Washington.
Eastern Europeans offer a more nuanced take. They lament Colby’s interest in reducing the U.S. military footprint in Europe. And I believe they are somewhat correct here: Air Force and Navy assets need to head to the Pacific, but the U.S. Army should retain and relocate its European forces from Germany toward Poland and the Baltic States.
But the Eastern Europeans also recognize the harder truth that Europe has long treated its defensive obligations as a joke. Speaking to the Washington Examiner, one Eastern European diplomat based in Washington decried what they call Colby’s “monomaniacal obsessions with the Indo-Pacific.” But they added, “Western Europe still needs to be smacked around plenty until they actually deliver on their promises to spend big on defense. It is all talk for now, as it has been since 2014.”
But the facts are clear. Following the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, the Europeans pledged to spend 2% of GDP on defense but then kept throwing money into their bloated social welfare budgets. Following Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western Europeans spoke big about defense spending, then backtracked as the war went on, saying they couldn’t afford to do more. It was only when Trump reentered office that the U.K., France, and Germany finally discovered the ability to make sizable, if insufficient, boosts to their defense budgets.
It also bears noting that Colby has repeatedly praised allies such as Poland, which recognizes the importance of matching action to rhetoric. He should do the same with the Baltic states. Regardless, there is a strategic utility to this tentative carrot and hard stick approach. Yes, when it comes to America’s most reliable allies, Colby’s messages should be delivered with more diplomatic niceties. Still, Colby’s shock and awe strategy reflects his apt sense of the urgency of now and the need for others to get on board. This urgency flows from the vast scale and potency of People’s Liberation Army forces across many diverse areas, including missiles, targeting and deception, space systems, sortie generation potential, naval air defense cruisers, and clandestine threats to the U.S. homeland.
Too few allies share this sense of urgency. An instructive example comes via Politico’s recent report on tensions between Colby and some allies.
On recent Pentagon engagement with Japan, for example, Politico reports, “Initially, Colby publicly called on Japan to spend ‘at least 3% of GDP on defense as soon as possible,’ which angered Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. But that number soon increased to a much steeper target of 5%. … ‘The Japanese were very frustrated,’ said a person familiar with the talks. ‘They thought that they were agreeing to at least negotiate on the basis of 3% or 3.5%. Then Colby, all of a sudden, got DOD to say 5[%], and the Japanese got angry, because that’s not what they just agreed to.”
Protocol is important to the Japanese, and Trump has treated this long-standing Pacific ally poorly with his tariff strategy. But the operative U.S. interest here is not that the Japanese were offended by Colby, but rather that they understand the exigency of spending much more on defense today. Japan will spend only 1.8% of its GDP on defense in 2025, a paltry sum in relation to the threat it faces.
Beijing is certainly making the argument for Tokyo. After all, two heavily armed Chinese coast guard ships recently operated within Japanese territorial waters for two successive days. That activity aside, any eventual Chinese seizure of Taiwan would be catastrophic for Japanese political, economic, and security interests.
This doesn’t mean one should salute all Colby’s policy prescriptions. As Politico also accurately reported, Colby questioned the British for deploying a carrier strike group to the Pacific this year. Colby believes these assets are better utilized deterring Russia so that the U.S. can focus on China. I disagree. The deployment of more capable European warships to the Pacific puts significant diplomatic pressure on Xi to consider carefully what might happen if he invades Taiwan. Beijing hates these military deployments, demanding lackey partners such as Spain avoid them entirely.
Yet, to underline why these exercises matter, consider the Talisman Sabre exercise led by Australia. It involves the British aircraft carrier strike group and ground and air forces from 19 nations, including the U.S., Australia, and South Korea. It is focused on China, involving exercises designed to simulate land defense of Taiwan and the Philippines, and the destruction of Chinese warships from air, land, and sea.
Again, however, we need to dig a little deeper. Colby’s skepticism of European aircraft carrier and destroyer deployments to the Pacific doesn’t tell the full story. Although they are highly sensitive operations, British and French submarine forces continue to engage in extensive training with their U.S. counterparts on China-related combat contingencies. And I understand from multiple U.S. and allied military sources that the Trump administration has made clear that, unless Russia launched a simultaneous war against NATO, it would appreciate U.K. and French submarine deployments in support of any China war effort.
STATE DEPARTMENT SECURITY AGENCY SPLURGES $200,000 ON SYDNEY JUNKET
Colby’s argument should be judged on one simple metric: urgency.
If you believe that the military threat posed by China to critical U.S. interests deserves more urgent attention, his arguments deserve general support. Conversely, if you believe that time and military power are on America’s side vis-a-vis China, Colby’s arguments deserve general repudiation. I’m in the former camp.